Inquiry-based analysis of early years children books : developping skills for later science education

Description

Distinguishing fact from fiction is a key feature of science. We investigate the use of children literature to develop this ability among 4-6 year old pupils. To this effect, we chose a children book where special laws, different from real-world natural laws, govern the fiction. Eight teachers were trained to teach a specially designed inquiry based teaching sequence. During the sequence, the children built a real-world device (well and pulley) of which the narration can be considered a literary model. They were then brought to compare the predictions of the model with their observations,and to comment on the contradictions. It appears that children can easily be brought to cross the gap between a literary fiction and a real-world experiment, and to awarely use the results of the latter to confront the predictions of the former.

Abstract

International audience

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